software as fetish

"As Chun (2005) argues, software is ideology in that the interface produces
specific modes of representations that shape modes of activity, and thus users"
pg.17
"Following Chun’s (2005) exploration of software as ideology, the starting point of this research lies in the examination of the types of cultural and communicational practices that are enabled by the software used by these formats and, in turn, of how these software layers shape the role of users as agents and actors within commercial and non-commercial representational spaces."
pg.19-20

While this isn't a point too much commented on in Langlois' paper, I wanted to investigate more on her foundation on Chun's claim that software is ideology. While I do agree that software indeed has some traits of ideology, I believe that these traits are created via software being commodity fetish. While the distinction may not be clearly seen as very impactful, I think viewing software as fetish instead of ideology produces different relationships between software and user and the modes of production they create.

I believe that the ultimate connection between software and fetish is the effect software has on its users. One of the most important effects of commodity fetishism is that as the laborer is estranged from his product so too is he estranged from his own labor (a commodity itself). The production process, then, is made independent from the laborer; the commodity is fetishized completely. Software, too, alienates its users from both the product and the production process. As software becomes more and more “standardized”, the work that we put into using software becomes more and more independent of us. For example, if I am working on retouching a photograph on Adobe Photoshop and want to learn how to create a certain effect, all I have to do is go online and find a step-by-step tutorial on how to do so. As a result, I, the user, become exchangeable; anybody and anyone can do what I did. I feel no connection or ownership of my own agency, and even if I did figure out how to create such an effect by myself, it is nullified by the fact that, anybody, after enough trial and error, could have achieved the same exact product as mine. The product then too is estranged from me, and not just because it could be the same as anybody else’s product. By making a product in Adobe Photoshop, it is not I who owns the product, but the software itself: this is made evident by the fact that if I did not have the correct software, in this case Photoshop, I would not be able to open the photoshop-only file (a reflexive discourse harking back to commodity fetishism). Thus, software renders the user exchangeable and consequently causes a “cognitive failing of the workers to grasp what really happens, while at the same time being part of the machinery.” And what is the ultimate result of this? Just as commodity fetishism creates a separation between exchange-value and use-value, software then creates a separation between the visible and the invisible. As many code/software theorists have written, software has privileged the arbitrary image, the imaginary graphical depiction of what is “going on” in our computers. Our fetishized software does not simply hide the hardware: it becomes independent of it and as a result, user’s see software’s value as not stemming from what it does with the hardware, but from what it seems to do on its own, on our screens, “visible” to us.

Viewing then software as fetishistic instead of ideological, there is a shift in what it means to "produce content or facilitate content production." Instead of looking at the customizeable aspects of amazon.com as a tool to create a false consciousness around the user, I wonder then if it these "personalized" affectations are actually creating even more of a (hidden) distance between user and "user-produced" content- after all, I didn't create those banners; they were created for me using technologies and programming hidden behind a veneer of visible image.